Chocolate Oatmeal Stout

Im somewhat new to home brewing ive done alot of homework on all aspects of brewing and just finished a 5gal batch of double chocolate espresso porter that turned out awesome! It was a kit and so is the stout that im getting ready to brew tommorow. My question is has anyone expermented with steaping in extra oats on a oatmeal stout. Im deffiently going to steap in some chocolate grain but i was reading that to much oats can turn the beer very bitter? I love bitter beers nothing like a good hoppy bitterness but thats not what i was looking for in the stout! Let me know what you guys think. Thanks

youd have to have a whole lot of oats to get an acrid flavor from them. ive used oats in excess on an oatmeal stout and it turned out fabulous. you can go overboard with anything, but oats, i think youll be fine with a touch extra.

Are you doing extract or partial mash kits?

Oats need to be mashed to extract the fermentables from them. I don't think you gain anything from just steeping them.

if you use rolled oats, which are pre-gelatanized, you can steep them. im pretty sure anyway.

Without mashing you'll have a lot of starch from the oats, even pre-gelatanized as far as I know. That's one thing that made me go AG

brewmasterpodunkarizona said:

if you use rolled oats, which are pre-gelatanized, you can steep them. im pretty sure anyway.

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If you use rolled or flaked out you don't need to do a cereal mash (cooking them beforehand), but they still need to be mashed just like all the other base grains. But pre-gelatanized or not, if you want more then just a bunch of starch they need to be mashed.

If you want to add more oats, just add some 2 row to the steeping grains also and hold it at ~154 degrees for an hour. Small partial mashes aren't all that much harder then the extract + steeping grain method.

Also, to answer your initial question about bitterness, I don't think there is any way that oats would contribute a bitter flavor. That's probably more from people going overboard with the roasted grains or bittering hops or a combination thereof.

I think extra chocolate malt would be more prone to give you excess bitterness than extra oats.

Thanks for the input guys ill have to check on what oats i have at home before i steep them. I asked the guy at the brew shop about putting in the extra oats and i took what he gave me. He did not say anything about having the do a mash on them. Ill keep everyone up to date on how the stout turns out. Thanks again!

So we just finished up brewing, everything went well except for my brew buddy broke the grain bag!!!!!!! What a mess! So we ran it threw a filter as we normally do when we transfer from the brew kettle to the 6.5 gal carboy but im a little concerned about the about grain being in the kettle the whole time we brewed. has anyone ever had this happen to them and how did the beer turn out?

I think its going to be a bit of a problem actually; once you steep grains at 170+ F, or for longer than half an hour or so, they start to release a lot of the tannic/astringent flavors from the grain hulls. If you boiled it for an hour after steeping, then yeah you're gonna get a lot of that going on, sorry man.

Just call it "Her Majesty's Earl Grey Oatmeal Chocolate Stout" and people will think it was intentional...

I boiled oats in a bag and within 1 minute I had a firm ball. I assume my utilization from this was horrible.

Do folks do anything different to allow it to be stirred? Does anyone free boil, then skim, then filter?

(sorry for the 1/2 hijack)

don't worry about mashing the oats. for extract the oats lend flavor and mouthfeel